For those of you who have been waiting with bated breath:  we went right by the Big Texan Steak Ranch on the way back from breakfast, so I popped in to look at the winner board and see whether either of our two Wyoming contestants from last night made it.  Nope, neither one.  The odds were against them, after all!

Today we headed out for the first two of six NPS sites we will visit during this trip: Lake Meredith National Recreational Area and Alibates Flint Quarries National Monument, which is a separate unit inside Lake Meredith NRA.  We ran into our first disappointment when we discovered that the Lake Meredith visitor center is closed on weekends.  (We've run into this before, and I never understand it.  Surely weekends in summer are the highest use days for any park, let alone a recreational lake!)  But in the meanwhile, how are we supposed to get the stamp for our  national parks passport????  Saturday starting ominously out like Friday. 

Fortunately, we found a ranger cleaning the campground bathroom (never think that being a ranger is all nature and glamour!), and he told us we could get the stamp at Alibates.

Unless you are a boat owner, there is not a lot for you to do at Lake Meredith. We drove down to the boat ramp and up to the overlooks to have a look at the lake, and we drove over the dam which formed the lake in 1965.  Sanford Dam is an earthen dam, which was of some interest to me, because I just recently read Ivan Doig's fictionalized account of the building of the Fort Peck Dam on the Missouri River in Montana, one of the most ambitious works projects.  That dam, much larger than Sanford Dam, collapsed partway through construction in 1938.  (The Wikipedia page on the Fort Peck Dam is here, but is pretty nerdy, though the details confirm Doig's version. This page, in atlas obscura, is a lot more readable.  It is an impressive dam, so if you're interested in that sort of thing, I recommend this site. )

At any rate:  we drove over Sanford Dam, went to the overlook, and then drove around to the down-river side, so I got a pretty good look at what an earthen dam looks like.

We then went on to Alibates Flint Quarries.   We had signed up for the two-hour ranger-led walking tour, and I definitely recommend you do that if you're ever here, because that's the only way you actually get inside the national monument.  The visitor's center is in the Lake Meredith territory.

Alibates preserves several thousand flint quarry pits which were originally hand dug and worked by natives in the area beginning about 13,000 years ago.  I'll put most of the explanation in the photos, but the basic story is that only in this place is this particular kind of flint found.  It is extremely hard (harder than steel and glass) and very sharp.  The discovery of the flint and the development of it into tools allowed the people of the area to cut through bison skin--and mammoth skin.  This allowed them to develop a whole new kind of society.  (The ranger here took the position of the "mammoths were largely hunted to extinction by humans" version of what happened to them.)

The tour was quite interesting: it was mostly about geology.  The top layer of the surrounding landscape is called ogalalla, and consists of sediment deposited by glaciers.   (I should note that the website above ascribes to a previously popular hypothesis that the silicone came from ash from the eruption of the Yosemite super volcano, but, the ranger told us that more recent research reveals that the silicone was in the area before the eruption of that volcano.)  The glaciers brought silicone into the area, and the silicone seeped into the porous layer of dolomite, actually altering some of the dolomite into the flint.  Underneath all of it is a soft layer of red clay, which erodes easily, bringing  the flint layer down the mountainsides.  The quarries are centered in the areas where erosion exposed the flint.

We also got to watch a skilled flint-knapper (one who works the flint into tools) in the visitor's center, and it was a pretty impressive display.  For one thing, the first step in the process of converting the raw material to a knife, or scraper, or arrowhead is to hammer the rock so that the flint breaks off in natural layers.  This guy was able to predict how the flint would split when hit in a particular place, and it was not any pattern I would have predicted.   He was able to read the rock, as it were, just by looking at it.

In the evening, we went to the first of two drive-ins for this trip.  (Three are actually possible, but trying to get to five drive-ins in three weeks without having to watch the same movies over and over is a pretty difficult task.)  As it happens, this theater was playing Ant Man and the Wasp, which we have not seen, and The Incredibles 2, which we have.  Fortunately, Incredibles was second, so we could leave after the first show.

This theater, the Tascosa, is not aesthetically pleasing.  It has a long history, but has been allowed to fall into disarray, although it does a rollicking business.  There were about 50 cars in line already when we got there 20 minutes before the gate was scheduled to open, and there must have been at least 200 cars there by the time the film started.  One of the staff told me they can handle about 300 cars.  Huge.  The theater originally opened in 1953, and a second screen (complete with a second huge parking lot) was opened in 1967.   At some point, the original screen tower burned to the ground and that original site was turned into an RV park.  (The timeline is murky--what I found on the internet contradicts what the guy told me last night.)  The second, now only, screen closed at some point, and re-opened in the early 90s, I think under new ownership.  In 2003, the remaining screen blew over in heavy wind.  There is a big, complicated bracing system on the screen now.

The movie was nothing to write home about, so I won't write much.  Tim hated it much more than I did; I just thought that we've seen worse Marvel movies--recently.  This one is derivative and after awhile starts to resemble the old film It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World in the frenetic chase scenes with several different parties all wanting the same prize and taking turns getting the upper hand.  A bit boring.  The film was probably 30-40 minutes too long, but it did have some humor and was less violent than most Marvel films.  I can't say that I recommend it; if you have anything better to do, such as clean the bathroom or take a nap, I suggest you do that.

Tomorrow is a Route 66 day; we'll drive about 300 miles to Albequerque and explore the old Route 66 relics along the way.